Welfare Reform Bill

I have just a query for the Minister. What he is saying is wise. He understands that we fully support both the principle of UC and the continuum between not being in work and being in work. There is no dispute between us. However, I worry about the huge area of responsibility and effectively discretion that will fall on first level Jobcentre Plus staff. As my noble friend said, no one doubts their goodwill or that they will do the best they can. However, given the centralisation of Jobcentre Plus offices, the fact that staff are often young and that the office may be in a town or city with a substantial choice of jobs compared to rural areas, from my experience they will often have very little understanding of the difficulties experienced in a rural village where the only jobs may be part-time cleaning, childminding if you are lucky, picking mushrooms or cleaning caravans. Those are the options, and none of them would fulfil the work conditionality without serious travel that would impede people’s capacity to look after their children and meet school hours. I say to the Minister, in capital letters, that so much of the effective delivery of what we all want will rest on the shoulders of junior staff: AOs, with luck supervised by an experienced EO, working in local offices and living some 40 or 60 miles away from the circumstances of an individual in a rural village of which they will have no knowledge. I do not know how far the Minister can go in giving assurances. Of course he will want the best possible training, but I am worried about this. Perhaps the answer will involve intensifying supervision and scrutiny by more experienced senior officers at the review level—the EO level—to make it more possible, so that this does not migrate upwards into the tribunal system that my noble friend identified. We have picked up this problem in the past, and it will become more acute as more people are brought into the conditionality realm. So much will hang on the experience of the staff handling their applications.